Law enforcement agencies have a need to execute electronic surveillance on certain phone numbers, subject to a lawful surveillance order. A lawful surveillance includes the sending of call identifying information (data) and if authorized, content of a subject's communication. In order to clarify the responsibility of telephony service providers, the United States Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (CALEA).
CALEA further defines the existing statutory obligation of telecommunications carriers to assist law enforcement in executing electronic surveillance pursuant to court order or other lawful authorization.
Section 103 of CALEA sets forth the assistance capability requirements that telecommunications carriers need to maintain to support law enforcement in the conduct of lawfully-authorized electronic surveillance. Specifically, CALEA directs the telecommunications industry to design, develop, and deploy solutions that meet certain assistance capability requirements.
Pursuant to a court order or other lawful authorization, carriers must be able to: (1) expeditiously isolate all wire and electronic communications of a target transmitted by the carrier within its service area; (2) expeditiously isolate call-identifying information of a target; (3) provide intercepted communications and call-identifying information to law enforcement; and (4) carry out intercepts unobtrusively, so targets are not made aware of the electronic surveillance, and in a manner that does not compromise the privacy and security of other communications.
A standard for intercepting the subject's communication call identifying information and content has been defined in the TIA/EIA J-STD-025 and J-STD-025A standards, herein incorporated by reference. Two levels of intercept apply, Level 1 and Level 2. Level 1 intercepts provide call details (a.k.a. call identifying information), such as the calling party number, the called party number, the date and time of the call, and other details related to the subject's communication. Level 2 intercepts provide Level 1 details, as well as call content, such as a copy of the voice or data transmitted.
J-STD-025/025A defines the surveillance information to be delivered to law enforcement and some common data encoding methods for subject call identifying information to be used. The method of access to call identifying information and/or content within the subject's serving switch varies by switch vendor and switch architecture. The term “Intercept Access Point” (IAP) is used to refer to the particular switch or switches in the telecommunications network wherein access to subject communications details and content occurs. The interface between Access and Delivery, commonly referred to as the ‘d’ interface, is also specific to the platform implementation.
The delivery interface, from the IAP switch to the law enforcement agency data collection box, is not defined in the standards and therefore each switch vendor has developed transport methods to assure information delivery to law enforcement.
The current method for delivering call identifying information from an IAP switch to law enforcement has not been defined as standard and generally relies on ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) or digital data circuits transporting X.25 data packets over high speed links. Although this method is able to deliver the required data, in most cases it is both costly and too complex for law enforcement to use, especially for the smaller agencies. It requires expensive circuits, data routing equipment, and dedicated switch hardware, as well as complex provisioning procedures by the service provider and the law enforcement agency. These circuits provide delivery capacity far in excess of the typical user requirements. Furthermore, the method requires provisioning lead times that do not, in many cases, meet the emergency surveillance requirement of law enforcement for criminal or national security purposes.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and data collection apparatus that allows call identifying information to be sent from an IAP switch to a data collection box simply and inexpensively. A need also exists for a method and apparatus that allows the call detail content to be sent in a more timely manner utilizing the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), thus avoiding the need for private law enforcement networks for delivery of the data. Delivery of a subject's call identifying information (data) is a subject of this invention.